Saturday, November 06, 2010

THE ASSOCIATES: "WHITE CAR IN GERMANY"

Salvaged / restored footage; not seen this film before. This and "Q Quarters" were always my favourites...(this is Remodelled Bowie, I guess; and that one was Prefigured Scott, maybe. Always loved the coughing at the end, but not going to post it though; not tonight).

Re-edited for afterthoughts:

Can't leave this post alone for some reason - peripheral thoughts keep cycling around in my head, along w/ the song. I expect I've even posted about this before (it's a perennial fascination to me). At the time, it *ahem* felt like The Associates had picked up a ball that Bowie fumbled (or rather, refused to carry any further; a new manager, a New Career in a New Town beckoned...) and which Scott could've picked up after "Nite Flights", but instead continued to watch from the Subs Bench before ambling onto the pitch with "Climate of Hunter" and playing a different game altogether...

*shrugs*

Those two songs in particular are beautifully hollowed-out, numb-yet-languid; an unlikely collision of minimalist precision and baroque swirl. The production's awesome in its sheer wrongness - press a button and see what happens - druggy and expansive, yet simultaneously claustrophobic, insular and hermetically sealed: a self-contained, self-referential soundworld, oblique but oddly emotional. It's all surface - hints and glimpses of some deeper interior, yet the listener feels trapped inside of something. A jewelled mirrorball of possibilities or frozen expectation? The fascination is in listening-to - witnessing - these seemingly oppositional tensions.

NumbGlam.

They were bonkers live.

I keep wondering: where's that ball now? Does it even exist anymore and - fuck it! - does it matter if it doesn't?

3 Comments:

How dare you man - now you got me trawling through the entire Associates back-catalog in chronological order no less - including old Billys rmake of Heart of Glass no less - but one thing is certain - the Message Oblique Speech / Blue Soap 12 inch is certainly - way out there !!